I am and have been, since as far back as I can remember, a fan of Mohammad Ali. As a teenager his was the last face I saw before I slept, the first when I woke up: Artistically dotted with sweat like condensation on a cold glass, he stood ringside, unsmiling, gloves one over the other. The poster over my bed was life sized. Imagine my disbelief and delight when a man I dated (for the shortest of times,) who worked at the American consulate in Bombay, said he would get me ringside seats at the exhibition match. I cannot even describe what I felt when I got to shake one those hands from inside those gloves. I didn’t pass out, thankfully.

Before that, In 1976, I was in (then) Yugoslavia, visiting my mother and new-born sister. One of Ali’s fights was to be televised live in Europe. I had never seen anything live on TV before. Then my mother said the landlady had a color TV – I didn’t know such a thing existed! So off we went, and I sat there watching, mouth open, completely enthralled by the whole experience. We are used to this now, but to watch, in color, my hero, in real time when the term real time wasn’t yet invented – it is one of the most memorable events of my life. Still is. While my mother and I were at the landlady’s, we had put my white jeans (it was 1976, people wore white jeans) in a pot on the stove to boil away the grime. When we went back upstairs, the house was full of smoke, the jeans were a small black lump stuck to the pot, my baby sister had not asphyxiated because my mother had put a towel under her bedroom door to prevent the warmth from the space heater seeping out. But that’s another story, nothing to do with Mohammad Ali or my love for him.

Watching him these last years, not floating like a butterfly, not even making a sentence without trouble, was what made me question my great love for football, and why I stopped watching it altogether.

He died too young, and I am aware that what killed him was also what made me love him.

Marcus Roberts, genius of modern piano, is working on a new recording – “Romance, Swing, and the Blues” – with Marcus Roberts and his new band, the Modern Jazz Generation. My son, Tissa Khosla, is part of this new band.

Here is a link to Marcus’ kickstarter project, which will contribute to funding for the new band, and this recording.

A few days ago I uploaded “Slither” to Amazon Kindle. I received an email (copied below) saying they would not be offering my book for sale because “the book contains content that is in violation of our content guidelines”.

I thought maybe I was now in the revered company of George Orwell, D.H. Lawrence, John Steinbeck, Toni Morrison, and so on. But, it might just be the cover art – a Gauguin nude – that violates their guidelines. Or the fact that the title says clearly that it is carnal prose. It could even be that someone read the whole book and decided it would be a “poor experience” for other readers – they say in the guidelines “We don’t accept books that provide a poor customer experience. Examples include poorly formatted books and books with misleading titles, cover art or product descriptions. We reserve the right to determine whether content provides a poor customer experience.”

There was no explanation as to what specific content violated their guidelines, but reading through those guidelines made me reluctant to ask. They could fit my book into any of those violations, after all (Copied below).

Content GuidelinesYour books and other content (such as book titles, cover art and product descriptions) must adhere to these content guidelines. We reserve the right to make judgments about whether content is appropriate and to choose not to offer it. We may also terminate your participation in the KDP program if you don’t adhere to these content guidelines.

Offensive ContentWhat we deem offensive is probably about what you would expect.

Illegal and Infringing ContentWe take violations of laws and proprietary rights very seriously. It is your responsibility to ensure that your content doesn’t violate laws or copyright, trademark, privacy, publicity, or other rights. Just because content is freely available does not mean you are free to copy and sell it.

Public Domain and Other Non-Exclusive ContentSome types of content, such as public domain content, may be free to use by anyone, or may be licensed for use by more than one party. We will not accept content that is freely available on the web unless you are the copyright owner of that content. For example, if you received your book content from a source that allows you and others to re-distribute it, and the content is freely available on the web, we will not accept it for sale on the Kindle store. We do accept public domain content, however we may choose to not sell a public domain book if its content is undifferentiated or barely differentiated from one or more other books.

My Marathi is good enough to talk to my sister (whose Marathi is worse than mine), and not at all good enough to read the translation.

This translation happened with my technical and legal consent. There was a clause in the contract with my publisher which allowed them to sell the translation rights. Needless to say, I learned my lesson. Neither the translator, to my shock and disappointment, nor the publisher, made ANY contact with me during the translation process. Two copies of this Marathi version arrived in my mailbox, and that was how I found out.

To start with, the title of the book translates back to English approximately as “I Will Lie” which immediately said to me that the title was chosen for market impact . It does not say what I intended. I was not, to put it mildly, delighted. I opened the book, and with some apprehension, read the acknowledgements. And at that point I figured that I would probably drop an eyeball if I read any more. There was a clear mistake in understanding what I meant by “my sisters”, and the translator has taken the liberty of assuming my meaning without bothering to check. At that point I gave up. It seems to me, from what I could tell from reviews of the book, that basically this is now a terrible book. The publisher’s blurb on the cover also sensationalizes it for no reason, as “explosive” and so forth. Sleaze.

My mother, Gauri Deshpande, worked on several translations. She talked to the authors, or, in the case of Sir Richard, did an enormous amount of research and put a lot of thought into it, sometimes agonizing over single words. Shashi Deshpande, who translated my mother’s “Deliverance”, too, did the same. I can’t understand why a translator would not even have a phone conversation with an author whose book she is translating – I am neither dead nor unapproachable.

Anyone who has actually read it in both languages, if there is such a person, I would love to hear what you have to say. Maybe it is not as terrible as I fear. But from what little I have read, I fear it is.